Scholarly Commentary

Introduction

This is DGR's final effort to illustrate Goethe's
Faust
. In this case one can see how the subject held his interest for so
long. This painting clearly relates to his Pandora and, through that work, to Cassandra, Venus Verticordia, and a whole related set of pictures and poems in which a female
figure focuses a severe judgment on a male-dominated world. The figures can
be threatending, like Lilith, or victims, like Gretchen in this and the other Faust pictures, or
ambiguous, like “Jenny”.

Production History

The idea to illustrate this scene was in DGR's mind as early as 1868, when he
executed a drawing in coloured chalk. A preliminary sketch seems to have been made a
few years earlier. DGR undertook the oil painting in 1878 for Leonard Rowe
Valpy after Valpy decided against purchasing DGR's Dante's Dream. Evidently the painting was already begun when DGR proposed in
August that Valpy consider some other works in lieu of the
rejected large Dante picture (see
Fredeman, Correspondence
78.161, 78.196
).